How tango lessons at a bar helped this stroke victim walk again

Originally published March 28, 2016 at 7:42 pm
Updated March 29, 2016 at 10:50 am

After suffering a stroke on his 11th birthday, Tho Nguyen, 31, didn’t walk for years. Then he took tango dance lessons. (Sy Bean & Corinne Chin / The Seattle Times)

“I’ll be your human walker,” tango instructor Gabriela Condrea told Tho Nguyen when he showed up to class in a wheelchair. He stood, and though he hadn’t walked in many years, the intimate dance led to a breakthrough.

Condrea, 34, knew the potential tango has. She knew the mechanics of two people standing and moving together, one leading and the other pushing through each step. She knew how to achieve balance and flow.

But Nguyen, 31, had to have the guts, and the faith, to show up at all.

“I was feeling sad,” he explained of the period when — urged on by his counselor — he started Googling meetup groups and saw there were tango lessons at Amber every Tuesday night. It seemed the answer to a lot of his problems.

He arranged a ride from his parents’ home in Renton through King County Metro’s Paratransit program.

“I’m determined,” he said. “I wanted to be with people, socialize and relax and work on my mobility.

“I was never able to walk without holding on,” he continued. “And when I started doing it with Gabriela, I felt confident. I wanted to force myself to do something more, physically. I wanted to be able to work on my walking and my depression at the same time.”

But it was a risky venture. The floor at Amber is concrete. Nguyen was deathly afraid of falling, and rightly so: “It’s like being tied up with a rope and being pushed over,” Condrea said of Nguyen’s fear.

Condrea, a former Garfield High School cheerleader and eighth-grade teacher, first encountered the tango in 2008, when she went to South America to do volunteer work. On her first night in Buenos Aires, she went to a tango club on her own, took a class and fell in love with the dance.

“People were hugging and moving around the dance floor in a circle,” she recalled. “They were floating. I was amazed at how graceful they looked and all the different ways they intertwined.

“It wasn’t the rigid, straight lines, the fishnets and red rose in the teeth,” she said. “It was a conversation, and it felt very organic to watch.”

She stayed in Buenos Aires for two years, studying and writing about tango, and went on to write “When 1+1=1: That ‘Impossible’ Connection,” a book about the impact of the tango. In 2010, she started leading workshops and classes like the one at Amber.

While Condrea works with other students, Nguyen parks his wheelchair under the bar and walks his way around it, holding onto the back of the bar stools.

Classmates have been patient and helpful, taking turns moving with him.

“The core group is kind of like a little family,” Condrea said.

The bar owner, Wade Peterson, even brought in a cake to mark Nguyen’s “tango birthday.”

Nguyen is determined to someday get out of his wheelchair for good, and depend only on a cane — or a dance partner.

“I feel like I’ve become more interactive and more confident about myself and more connected to others,” he said. “I feel like I’m more normal.”